


Flight of Fancy

by whopooh



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, Phryne on love, Phryne on men, The Green Mill Murder, knitted sweater, knitting fic, retrospection, s1e3, smit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 10:14:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7636279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whopooh/pseuds/whopooh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An attempt to put knitting fic into “The Green Mill Murder” turned into Phryne contemplating men and lovemaking. Part of the SmitCoin Chronicles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flight of Fancy

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to heavyheadedgal for thinking out the title, and to Fire_Sign for reading through and suggesting improvements!

As soon as she had said those four syllables aloud – ”Victor Freeman” – while scrutinizing the photograph, Phryne Fisher had known this was where she would end up: in the place where he was, dressed in nothing but an oversized sweater belonging to him, after having spent the night together. She wouldn’t have been pinpointing it as a grey, knitted sweater - she wasn't psychic - but the rest was not second sight, merely knowing herself, and knowing him. 

Phryne’s history with Victor Freeman was long and complicated. They had known each other through their adolescence, before the war; his family was friends with Aunt Prudence and Uncle Edward, and even if Victor hadn’t been her first lover, he was the first she had dreamed about before having. He was three years older than her, with a younger brother that was always tagging along and vying for attention. As a young teenager she had looked up to him like something of a hero. He was dashing, strong, and adventurous, and he knew how to treasure her desire for adventure. He was the first to make her fly in lovemaking, the first to bring her up in a plane, and then the first to let her fly a plane herself. Her memory of him was forever coloured by that exhiliration.

When she understood that Victor Freeman was alive and not rotting away in the ground somewhere in Europe, it sent a shock through her system. When she saw him, another shock: the way he looked the same, and yet not. How she knew his profile, the way he looked at her, the way he moved, but not this new posture of inevitable defeat and self-loathing that he carried, and not the scars he had acquired in the war. 

To make love to him here and now, in this cottage while his little brother slept in the next room (very reminiscent of the old days), was exhilirating, beautiful, sweet, and immensely sad. There wasn’t a question about this being something new – it was not a beginning, but an ending. Being allowed to see him alive and feel him alive, with all his limbs intact and his hair flopping into his eyes after having believed him to be dead for years, made it possible for her to close the chapter of Victor Freeman in her book. She would look back on him with happiness mingled with sadness – for his energetic youth and all its promises, for the way his life turned out, for the taste of his tongue in her mouth – but she knew she wouldn’t visit him again. They had no real common ground to pick up anything from; they had never been as wonderful on the ground as they were in the sky. They were too alike – as youngsters the same kind of reckless dreamers, now having seen too much of life – and apart from the fact that Phryne Fisher did not particularly need any man, she most certainly did not need one so like herself. Damn it, it was much more likely that she would have married Victor’s younger, homosexual brother than him, Phryne realized. She decided that in some odd, parallel life, that was probably what she had done, and managed to keep all her freedom to explore. No, Victor Freeman was not for keeping, just as Phryne Fisher wasn’t – not in their youth, when they had been together for all of four months, and not now. 

But Phryne had never shied away from loving someone only for a night, and she had adored Victor for every minute of their nocturnal meeting - as he deserved to be adored, as he thought he would never be again because of his scars, and as she always luxuriated in adoring men in her boudoir. There was something amazingly life-affirming in making love to a man she felt a connection to, that gave her some kind of spark of recognition – a beautiful smile, a knowing glance, eyes that could speak volumes, an exciting history, a voice that melted her bones, an interesting imperfection, a beauty hidden beneath a superficial blandness, a tic that had her intrigued, a sense of humour, a sense of gravity, a sense of adventure... every man held his own charms. This life-affirming act was what she had done with Victor, and she was certain he felt as invigorated by it as she did. He hadn’t failed in adoring her back, intensely, and his touch and his kisses had both felt the same and very different, layered with experiences neither of them wanted to say out loud, but somehow knew they shared.

Now, though, it was the morning after. Reality was about to crash in, and just before she had to go back, Phryne gloried in sitting in Victor’s grey, woollen sweater, sensing the slightly ticklish material against her naked skin, stroking it with her fingers and imagining feeling him at the same time. Phryne was a tactile lover, favouring both to touch and be touched with abandon, and the wool was a perfect representation of Victor Freeman, of his softness and his roughness, his edges and his ease. She knew the sweater’s neckline showed off exactly the right amount of her own skin to make her irresistible, and this was something she wholeheartedly approved of. 

Phryne only rarely wore clothes that belonged to the men she had made love to. Wearing their clothes was such an intimate gesture, not fit for a casual meeting – like the one she had had with Sasha, the beautiful tango dancer, or the one she wished she had had time for with the promising young student Lindsay. Wearing her lover’s clothes was reserved for the ones that truly meant something to her, the ones she had some history with. There were a few men that held that position in her life, but very few. She concluded the rare moment of allowing herself to reminisce and feel the deep rooted melancholy she always carried within her, but usually covered up.

The time for brooding was over. Her mind was swept up by the case – Victor immediately saw the change in her posture that showed her mind was elsewhere – and as she touched the wood to throw it into the fire, she realized how the murder had been committed.

It was time for action, for work, and for justice; for the brothers to say good bye again and for her to dazzle the grave Inspector Robinson - who did have that kind of bone-melting voice, and who had proven himself to be more prone to playfulness than she had imagined when she first met him - with the solution of the case. She would probably aquit the Freeman brothers and help convict a murderer before the day was over. The very first step was to get out of the sweater and into the air plane for the return flight. Regardless of the circumstances, Phryne could never help but feel utter joy about going up in the air. For a short while, all the pressing matters would seem far away, all the people on the ground tiny dots that didn’t concern her, and there would be nothing in her mind but the direction and the elements. The rest would happen soon enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Phryne’s association to a parallel life is of course a nod to Fire_Sign’s wonderful AU "A Glass Splinter". I do love me an intertextual nod here and there :-)
> 
> (I am not acquainted with book!Victor Freeman though, only the show version.)


End file.
